from the captcha-is-advertising-and-advertising-is-captcha dept

I hate Captcha systems. Now, I don't only hate them because they're only mildy effective while being creatively annoying, but also because I'm a toaster-class Cylon and I consider them an affront to my intelligence. Okay, that isn't true, but the fact is that Captcha hasn't evolved all that much in the past several years and it's generally an annoyance. You type in barely legible words, that occasionally have a strikethrough, and the best you can hope for is that the word combinations say something laughable so you at least get a little entertainment out of the experience.

Ticketmaster has moved to ditch it in favour of a simpler system. It means users will write phrases, such as "freezing temperatures", rather than, for example, "tormentis harlory".

Oh. Okay, well that's...mildly different, I suppose. If you're wondering how this almost noticeable change in user input is going to be achieved, allow me to explain. See, instead of using whatever 8-year-old-boys-playing-Madlibs algorithm that's currently employed to generate the response words in barely legible form, the system will now be a sort of Q&A, chiefly used to allow advertising in the form of questions. For instance, you might be given the name of a well-known brand of gum followed by a request to input what the brand name is commonly associated with. You might also get to answer in multiple choice format. While the choice to include advertisements within the system may seem odd, at least everything will now be legible. Testing thus far appears to show positive results.

The average time to solve a Captcha puzzle was 14 seconds, while the new system was taking users an average of seven seconds to figure out.

Halving the input time is certainly an improvement. It remains to see how many advertisers want to be associated with a system not all that different from one almost universally hated.

Re:

It may help to digitize books, but especially with older books I think it does more damage than good. For example the average user cant be bothered to differentiate between ſ and f, therefore filling classic literature with fome fhit.

Re: Re:

I actually thought the recaptchas were kind of neat. I mean, when you complete one of those, you're actually helping to digitise some kind of book or document. It almost made me feel a small sense of pride to know I was contributing to some kind of noble project to preserve knowledge just by filling out a silly scrambled-letter puzzle.

Although, after watching Solve's video, I guess I can agree that typing stuff out of ads is more fun than just watching them clog up a page. If this could reduce banner ads, I'd be all for it.

Recently I followed a link to a site that wanted you to solve a captcha by watching a small video and entering what it told you. Unfortunately someone screwed up because even though the phrase was written in clear, block letters that were as easy to read as the headline to this story, it wouldn't accept it and kept telling me that I entered it wrong.

Reddits Idea of Captcha fun.

I think captchas should be made fun and enjoyable like
whenever you solve one as soon as you submit it a politician or banker or corporation are immediately killed / destroyed
But that's just me I guess?

With the way I have my security set up on my home computer (no Javascript or Active X, highest possible firewall settings, etc.) I can't do Captcha from home. I have to use public computers for sites that use Captcha.

All these allegedly "Techie" people, and the missed the obvious???

:wtf:

Okay, I get Cylon Boy: toasters aren't particularly smart. But the rest of you??

The one I see the most with the "new" systems that Ticketmaster is about to use, has been using that along with standard character recognition (about a 50-50 split), for YEARS. One of the most ubiquitous free picture uploaders on the planet: TinyPic.

It's okay, but there are times where the images either don't resolve, or the picture with the question don't even come up, and hitting the "new image" button doesn't work. Probably a fault of Captcha or ReCaptcha, not TinyPic. And it's still annoying--especially when you *have* a Photophuckit account, you log in, and it STILL refuses to acknowledge you don't have to have the "spamblockers". :hammer: